I believe I am jaded about progress on the desktop because whenever we get faster hardware, we get slower software and the user experience is approximately the same. If you're a big gamer then I guess things still improve, and speech control will go mainstream one day (Vista has it as standard but they don't push it), and we'll have to use pronounceable variable names.

But you can't pick a processor and order a good system around it, either. System building is a technical specialism, and basically you have to wait for a vendor to build the system that you want. That may never include the cute new processor that you heard about.

So really, are you excited about the new system, versus the new processor?

On top of that, tuning a new computer to get the best out of it is hard work. It really spoils the enjoyment.

As for a whole new dimension of bugs to solve, I am ecstatic to leave that to Microsoft. In fact, the number of service pack fixes that say "This fixes a bug in parallelism" influences me strongly to not use parallelism in individual queries: there's got to be a bunch of bugs they didn't find yet. Anyway our servers have more users than there are processors, so the point of parallelism is? 🙂